- Talks to Teachers - Chapter 1: On Right Education
(After the 9 chapters of talks to students, here starts 11 chapters of K talking to teachers about education)
Krishnamurti: It is our intention in places like Rishi Valley in the South and Rajghat in the North to create an environment, a climate, where one can bring about, if it is at all possible, a new human being.
Do you know the history of these two schools? They have been running for thirty years or more. The purpose, the aim and drive of these schools is to equip the child with the most excellent technological proficiency so that he may function with clarity and efficiency in the modern world, and far more important to create the right climate so that the child may develop fully as a complete human being. This means giving him the opportunity to flower in goodness so that he is rightly related to people, things and ideas, to the whole of life. To live is to be related. There is no right relationship to anything if there is not the right feeling for beauty, a response to nature, to music and art, a highly developed aesthetic sense.
I think it is fairly clear that competitive education and the development of the student in that process is very destructive. I do not know how deeply one has grasped the significance of this. If one has, then what is right education?
I think it is clear that the pattern which we now cultivate and call education, which is conformity to society, is very, very destructive. In its ambitious activities, it is frustrating in the extreme. And what we have so far considered, both in the West and East, as a development within this process, is culture. it is the inevitable invitation to sorrow. The perception of the truth of that is essential. If it is very clear, and if one has abandoned that voluntarily, not as a reaction, but just as a leaf falls away from the tree, a dropping away, then what is flowering, what is right education? Do you educate the student to conform, to adjust, to fit into the system or do you educate him to comprehend, to see very clearly the whole significance of all that and, at the same time, help him to read and write? If you teach him to read and write within the present system of frustration, then the flowering of the mind is impeded.
The question then is, if one drops this competitive education, can the mind be educated at all in the ordinary accepted sense of the word? Or does education consist really in taking ourselves and the student away from the social structure of frustration and desire and, at the same time giving him information about mathematics, physics, and so on? After all, if the teacher and the student are stripped of all this monstrous confusion, what is there to be educated about? All that you can teach the student is how to read and write, how to calculate, design, remember and communicate facts and opinions about facts.
So, what is the function of education and is there a particular method of education? Do you teach the student a technique so that he becomes proficient and in that very proficiency develops a sense of ambition? By teaching him a technique in order to find a job, you also burden him with its implications of success and frustration. He wants to be successful in life and he also wants to be a peaceful man. His whole life is a contradiction. The greater the contradiction, the greater the tension. This is a fact. When there is suppression in contradiction, there is greater outward activity. You give the student a technique and at the same time develop in him this extraordinary imbalance, this extreme contradiction which leads to frustration and despair. The more he develops his capacity in technique, the greater his ambition and the greater the frustration. You are educating him to have a technique which is going to lead to his despair. So the question is, can you help him not to drift into contradiction? He will drift into it if you do not help him to love the thing which he is doing.
You see, if the student loves geometry, loves it as an end in itself, he is so completely absorbed in it that he has no ambition. He really loves geometry and that is an enormous delight. Therefore he flowers in it. How will you help the student to love, in this way, a thing which the student has not yet discovered for himself?
If you are asked, as a teacher, what the intention of this school is would you be able to reply? I want to know what you are all trying to do, what you intend the student to be? Are you trying to shape him, condition him, force him in certain directions? Are you trying to teach the student mathematics, physics, giving him some information so that he is proficient technologically and can do well in a future career? Thousands of schools are doing this, all over the world - trying to make the student excellent technologically so that he becomes a good scientist, engineer, physicist and so on. Or are you trying to do something much more here? If it is much more, what is it?
"If it is much more, what is it?"......
ReplyDeleteMeans, do you have it?, have you contacted it?
Can you teach something you do not have contacted in reality, which is just theory?
K. briefly touches upon some important issues here, namely the relation of education to competition, ambition, and conformity to the social structure. Clearly, the very atmosphere in certain schools may work towards conditioning the students to be competitive, ambitious, to conform rather than to question, etc. And this pattern is likely continue after the students graduate.
ReplyDeleteHe then goes on to ask: "Does education consist really in taking ourselves and the student away from the social structure of frustration and desire?" If the answer is "yes", then it becomes important for the teachers in the school to make sure that the social atmosphere or micro-culture of the school is not 'contaminated' by the influence of the larger social structure and culture. Is that possible at all? And what exactly is meant by "taking away"? What will happen to the student if he suddenly moves from a culture, where competition is minimal, to a culture, where everybody is competing ruthlessly, and where it is extremely difficult to survive without competing?
Clearly, "taking away" cannot mean "ignoring". K. is asking: "Do you educate him to comprehend, to see very clearly the whole significance of all that [i.e. the social system]?" Perhaps the teachers can help the student to comprehend the social structure and the problem of competition, so that the student is able to face it and deal with it when the time comes.
Another interesting point is the suggestion that "by teaching him a technique in order to find a job, [the teachers] also burden [the student] with its implications of success and frustration." In contract to this situation, K. suggests that if the student finds something that he actually loves doing, then the problem of ambition would not arise.